News Corp tosses Rotten Tomatoes

Flixster to enjoy fruits of their labours

Film review site Rotten Tomatoes has been sold to Flixster, which collects user reviews for its site and mobile applications.

Rotten Tomatoes was an early dot-com darling and was sold to News Corp, as part of IGN, in 2005 for $650m. IGN runs several sites aimed at young men like, GameSpy and TeamXbox.

Financial terms were not revealed, but IGN gets a minority stake in Flixster as part of the deal and IGN's boss gets an observer seat on the board. Rotten Tomatoes' 13 staff will join Flixster's 45 people in its San Francisco offices.

The combined sites will serve 30m unique monthly visitors, but the two sites will continue to operate separately.

Flixster's boss Joe Greenstein told The San Francisco Chronicle: "There's no secret plan to launch a FlixsterRottenTomatoes.com...[the takeover] jump-starts us from being an exciting but emerging player to being a leader in the category." ®